Pope Leo, artificial intelligence and the desires technology will never satisfy

A Reflection for Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord,” St. Augustine begins the most famous sentence he ever wrote, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Tom Regan, S.J., assigned the bishop of Hippo’s Confessions to me and the rest of the freshmen taking his “Introduction to the Philosophy of Being Human” and told us to reread the work roughly once every 10 years. It would say something new to us in each stage of our lives. 

I am overdue for a rereading, but these words have never been far from my mind since I first encountered them. And I can’t help but think of the great influence they wield in a new way over the entire church through our first Augustinian pope.  

Pope Leo’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” is about many things, including artificial intelligence. But grounding the entire document is a pitch for a Christian understanding of what it means to be human. And fundamental to being human is to experience the desire that the psalmist speaks of with such vivid imagery in today’s readings (pining, thirsting; parched, lifeless and without water). But this capacity for desire is at great risk of being exploited.

Edward Bernays is widely considered the father of modern public relations. He also happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays took his uncle’s theories about human desire and applied them to the emerging fields of consumer marketing. Adam Curtis, whose 2002 documentary “The Century of Self” tells this story, describes Bernays’s insight: 

[Bernays] began to argue that the future of marketing, advertising and politics was to find ways of appealing to the emotional side of people through symbols, through the language of metaphor, in order to get people to react in the way that you wanted, quickly. He was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous attention-grabbing PR stunts, to the eroticising of the motorcar. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn’t need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.… Up until that time, the working classes only bought things that they needed. But, with Bernays’ input, people started to be sold something not because they needed it but because they would feel better if they had it. 

The thing is, these consumer goods only satisfy temporarily, if at all. Today, social media and artificial intelligence also take advantage of our desires: to be smarter, more attractive, more productive and, most troubling, less lonely. 

Our deep desire for God and for “fullness of life,” as Pope Leo puts it, is “at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations.” 

There are plenty of examples of people using artificial chatbots as substitute therapists, friends and romantic partners. Perhaps in your own usage, you’ve unknowingly assigned your ChatGPT or Claude agent a “personality.” 

Pope Leo issues one of his strongest warnings about artificial intelligence in this context: 

The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking. Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.

Our desires lead us to God and to the fullness of life, but they are fragile and particularly exploitable. They need to be tended and guarded from malicious actors, but also encouraged to seek the things that actually nourish: the true, the beautiful, the good; serving and loving real, actual, desiring humans.

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